The role of prospective faculty in higher education

Pharmacy is my passion. I am eager to learn everything related to medicine and drugs. However, I was unsatisfied by the ways pharmacy classes were taught to us during the undergraduate school. Classes were boring, merely a narration or PowerPoint slides summarizing what is already available in the text books. Evaluation of students was based on their ability to memorize stuff. Many students were wondering why they would come to class; they can just read the book before the exam and get high grades! I thought pharmacy was too interesting to be taught this way! I decided to be positive, and to do something about it! Since then my journey toward becoming a faculty started. I promised myself to find entertaining and interactive ways to teach classes in my favorite field… PHARMACY.

With the advent of new media technologies in higher education, teaching is made more interesting and collaborative, yet, more challenging! Knowledge is becoming available for everyone, in any topic you can imagine, and in all possible forms. You can find tons of electronic articles about your topic of interest and many educational audios and videos are broadcasted online. Educators and textbooks are no longer the main source of knowledge. In lieu of these tremendous changes in our means of acquiring knowledge, educators should reevaluate their teaching and classroom management techniques. The teacher should keep himself updated with all aspects of technology related to education. He also needs to master these skills and teach them to his students. This adds extra burden on the educator; he should not only master the content of his field of expertise, but also technology! Besides, if a new technology is to be used to teach a class, the educator should designate extra classes to teach it.

Narration or summarizing is no longer an effective teaching technique. The educator’s role is to attract his students to a topic by addressing its importance. Skills to be taught are no longer memorizing or recalling information. Rather, and educator should urge students to learn how to find information_good quality information, to think critically about it, analyze it and come out with new findings to enrich knowledge, ultimately making students’ aware of what is relevant and help them to convert knowledge into practice. There is and will be a huge shift in the role of faculty members in the education process. Knowledge is there all over the place. The teacher is a mere director of the class just like a maestro directs his musical band!

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5 Responses to "The role of prospective faculty in higher education"

I agree and as a musician (nice analogy by the way) I can comment that there is a HUGE difference in performance when you have a conductor who is energetic and passionate while being strict and focused. The ultimate goal in that scenario is to bring out the best in the group and that takes energy and committment on both sides of the equation.

I love the word “passion” as applied to teaching, and it is nice to see it coming out in your post (and in the comments of others). It suggests that the future faculty that we are assisting in their journey are up to the task! I look forward to working with you and learning from you as this class progresses.